One has to read a lot of dross thrust upon one by an impatient books editor with a page to fill and really good reads are rare - the odds are probably comparable with those for winning the lottery. And although winning the lottery once a year is admittedly unlikely, one does hope for one good book in a year's reading.
This year's best read has belatedly arrived and is so good it may prove to be the best read of the decade and certainly must be a strong contender in the next round of literary awards.
Of course, there must be an admission of bias: Peter Wells has long been one of my favourite writers so The Hungry Heart held promise from the outset and by the end of the first chapter was already exceeding expectations. It is the type of breath-catching non-fiction that makes the raciest thriller seem plodding.
William Colenso was one of the great figures of 19th-century New Zealand history though after his death in 1899, it was to take a century before his stature would be fully recognised and historians made to rue the loss of so much of his manuscripts and collections, some destroyed, others so widely dispersed as to vanish from public view.
Colenso (a colossus, as his name hints) bestrode the most vital decades of this country's history; more, Colenso lived and breathed that history.
Born in Cornwall in 1811, he came to New Zealand as an ill-educated missionary with the Church Missionary Society in 1834, lived in Paihia and Waimate North before he was sent in 1844 to establish a mission station in an isolated area of Hawkes Bay at Waitangi, near what is now Napier. His parish covered an astonishing 23,000sq km and over the next nine years, Colenso walked most of those squares, including eight crossings of the Ruahine Ranges, a trackless obstacle clad in dense bush.
Then, in 1853, his calling was shattered when news of his somewhat unusual domestic arrangements became public. Summarily dismissed by Bishop Selwyn, Colenso spent the remaining 46 years of his life trying to escape the stench that mired his reputation.
What did Colenso do that was so terrible? In effect, he went native.
Even before going to Hawkes Bay, he had taken an intense interest in all matters Maori and sensed long before others that the race was at a turning point, after which much would be lost never to be retrieved. Unlike his greedy colleagues in the New Zealand mission, Colenso was not there to grab as much land as he could; indeed, he held no land until after his dismissal from the Church. Colenso was aghast at what was happening to Maori and at the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, Colenso's was the lone voice to interrupt proceedings by publicly and loudly questioning its benefits for Maori.
Colenso and his New Zealand-born wife, Elizabeth, eagerly embraced the chance to launch a mission station in Hawkes Bay where Pakeha were scarce and the natives, they hoped, less tainted by contact. Their policy was total immersion in Maori society; they lived and breathed Maori to the extent that their two children grew up speaking no English for Maori was spoken exclusively in their home. But another Maori custom was polygamy and a Maori servant girl became, in effect, a second wife in the home, something that became a public scandal once she had given birth to a half-caste baby and admitted Colenso was the father.
Over the years, Colenso struggled to fashion a new life for himself. He was a prolific writer, eagerly self-educated, and he became a recognised expert on Maori customs and New Zealand flora. His essay on "The Maori Races", commissioned for the 1865 Dunedin Exhibition, shocked the sober-sided Presbyterian commissioners by its frankness but became, effectively, a surprise bestseller because it answered questions Pakeha were asking about the people among whom they had settled. On his hikes across the North Island (in many parts of which he was the first white man to set foot), he avidly collected botanical specimens, eventually becoming a major source of plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew in London and being honoured with membership of the Royal Society.
All of this biographical material and much more exists in The Hungry Heart but the book itself escapes the biography genre to become something much more. Describing it is not easy but there is a large clue in its subtitle: "Journeys with William Colenso".
Gradually, during the three years he spent on research, Wells merged intimately with Colenso and at times in this book, he almost seems to become Colenso. Walking again and again where Colenso walked before him, staring with a 150-year gaze at the same landscapes as his subject, breathlessly touching objects the missionary had held in his own hands, Wells identifies with his subject in a way no mere biographer could manage. One actually has to ponder whose hungry heart figures in the title.
Wells invites the reader to journey in his own imaginings - and on the subject of Colenso's sexual proclivities, these stray a long way - but he never allows them to be other than speculation and steers the subject back to the firmer ground of fact. What results is an act of creation that far exceeds the sum of its parts. Wells never stops asking questions, both of himself and his subject, and he answers most of them; more would be an impossibility.
Wells has a toe-curling ability with words that is enhanced by the richness of the book's illustrations.
And here, one must give credit to Vintage: this is one of the rare instances where a publisher has matched the riches offered by the author, offering us a work of rare beauty in itself.
While no dry academic work, The Hungry Heart has set a new standard in the writing of New Zealand history and Wells deserves every accolade.
Pester your local librarian to get this work on the shelves, hassle your nearest bookseller to stock it for you - that is how good this book is.
- Geoffrey Vine is a Dunedin journalist and Presbyterian minister.
